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Most of the time Visual Studio seems to work fine. But occasionally, it gets into a funky editing state. I can still type, but I can't move the cursor with the arrow keys. The arrow keys instead seem to take the focus off the editing window. The backspace doesn't work, but the delete key does. The only solution I have found so far is to close all open documents and reopen them.

Is this a bug, or one of those invisible "features" that just seems a lot like a bug? If not a bug, is there a way to toggle out of this state? Otherwise, is there a fix or patch for this?

Note: Some have suggested that this question belongs on SuperUser. I agree, so I'm joining in voting to close this question. However, if this question never gets closed, I will pick an answer once I can test them. This problem shows up sporadically, so it's hard to test and get back to you with my results. Thanks for your answers. I appreciate it!

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Plenty of feedback reports about this at connect.microsoft.com. I stopped reading them after a while, nothing definite and lots of users that abandoned their case. Maybe you'll have more energy. – Hans Passant Dec 21 '11 at 0:16
How did you find them? The search terms I was using turned up nothing useful. – benekastah Dec 21 '11 at 21:32
I typed "backspace" in the search box. – Hans Passant Dec 21 '11 at 21:33
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Jan 21 at 13:54

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6 Answers

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This seems to happen to me when I open a solution and there are files already open. I used to close the files, then close and re-open the solution to fix it, but now I just hit Alt + Enter.

Here is the blog where I found this trick.

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Awesome. This totally did it! Much easier than closing and reopening my windows all the time. Thanks! – benekastah Mar 30 at 18:33
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I had a problem with backspace in Visual Studio, but it turned out that the problem was actually in RealVNC, over which I was using Visual Studio. Maybe you have similar problem that is not coming from VS, only it manifests there.

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I'm operating on a machine that has VS installed directly. Good thought, though. – benekastah Dec 21 '11 at 21:33
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In most cases this helps me in this scenario: simply close the Toolbox window and the error is gone. You can safely reopen the window right after that, I had no problems doing it so far. The shortcut for reopening it is Ctrl-Alt-X.

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I had this too, it turned out to be a plugin that was out of date (ReSharper)

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Hmm. I had that installed at one point. Removed it later. I'll see if I can more fully remove it. Thanks! – benekastah Jan 19 at 18:22
Cool, let us know the result! – Trikks Jan 19 at 19:07
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up vote 0 down vote

I have encountered this issue a few times, Its seems to go away if I re-build the solution I am working on

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Try pressing CTRL+Enter. That fixed it for me when I had the same exact problem.

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